Monthly Archives: August 2009

Noticed in my local Tully’s coffee shop’s otherwise impeccable restroom this morning:

An ornately framed and quite stuffy small canvas painting of a landscape, rendered in a faux-pointillist semi-Impressionist style… below which scrawled in ball-point pen graffiti, simply “G.G. Allin”.

Remember the perennial rivals of Cheers’ softball team, Gary’s Old Town (or would it have been Towne? or Olde?) Tavern? Remember how Gary always used to turn up at Cheers and gloat before and after the games, to which Sam or Norm or Cliff would always retort that Gary stacked his team with ‘ringers’… great softball players of dubious long-term loyalty…

That was all I could think about tonight watching the Fox Soccer Report review of Man City’s 2-nil defeat of Crystal Palace.  I mean, that team is just kind of ridiculous. Last season, when the UAE ownership and Hughes’ appointment were announced, I kind of thought, “Ok, that’s a lot of oil money behind that club all of a sudden, but surely they can’t pull a Chelsea and up-end the whole Prem table overnight.”  Well, after the summer transfer session and the lineup that all that Dubai dough has purchased, it’s starting to look like Hughes-and-crew might do just that. 

Don’t get me wrong, 3 points is 3 points and Man City is wracking up the results on the left column. But as I review this rapidly-assembled team of mid-career quality now wearing the baby blue kits, I can’t help but think of the teams with which those stars really established their names and talents…

Given (newcastle)

Adebayor (arsenal)

Tevez (manutd)

Lescott (everton)

Toure (arsenal)

Wright-Phillips (chelsea)

Bellamy (blackburn)

Santa Cruz (blackburn)

Barry (aston villa)

Robinho (real madrid)

I mean, this is just an over-the-top quality core of solid players to lead a resurgent team. But I can’t help wondering which player who, in 5 years time, will cement himself in the minds of countless soccer fans as having really come into his own and established himself at Manchester City.  In other words, can Hughes turn this team full of ringers into ‘Cheers’ or will they have to be content with the consolation of being the frequently-victorious, but ultimately dispassionate, ‘Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern’ of England?

I’m a total noob in this field, having run our plucky-and-plugging-along social media marketing firm here in Seattle for a little more than 3 years, but already it seems to me that there are basically three types of client-facing attitudes which characterize most marketing services agencies when facing issues, concerns, questions, problems, or other types of ‘rough patches’ in the client-service-road:

(1) “Let’s figure it out!”

(2) “We’ll figure that out.”

(3) “We already figured this thing out, but that thing’s out of scope.”

I believe we are doing everything we can at our shop to focus on numbers (1) and (2). I sincerely hope that we don’t fall prey to the unfortunate inclination to exhibit number (3), evidence of which I have occasionally observed in the wild.

Ok, back to my regularly-scheduled infrequent musings here on the state of Arsenal’s attack, various contemporary art happenings, and other triviata…

Comment from my 4-and-change year old daughter yesterday, in response to exasperation about having to call her grandfather at her mother’s urging…

“Unnhhhhh, why don’t you just text him?”

<eyebrows up. chin down.>

I saw this decal on the side of a car at my coffee shop today. Does Facebook now have satellite-mounted scanners in space that identify your whereabouts and update your network automatically? If so, I think I’ll opt-out of that program, TYVM.